In my role as a Data Science and Data Curation Specialist at the Vanderbilt Libraries, I develop and present workshops and lessons to help beginner and intermediale-level learners develop skills for coding and using technical tools. These lessons are focused in three main areas: coding with Python and R, and using GitHub.
To view current lesson offerings, see the Digital Scholarship and Communications (DiSC) Education and Training page.
CodeGraf
Most lessons are organized around a self-paced system dubbed CodeGraf. Each CodeGraf lesson contains a series of short 3-6 minute instructional videos, supplemented with TLDR main points and code snippets. The lesson concludes with a set of exercises for practice. A user can work through lesson series as part of a synchronous class, or make their own path through the lessons asynchronously in the style of “choose your own adventure”.
Python
The following Python lesson series are available in the CodeGraf format:
- Introduction to coding with Python (Jupyter notebook-based)
- Working with files and tables(including an introduction to Pandas)
- Introductory lesson for plotting with Pyplot
I’ve also developed non-video materials for using Python for web scraping and interacting with APIs.
R and RStudio
The following R lesson series are available in the CodeGraf format:
- R and RStudio basics
- Introduction to statistics with R (under construction)
- Data visualization in R with ggplot (under construction)
The following lesson series is available in the CodeGraf format:
- Introduction to GitHub (using GitHub Desktop; no command line)
Additional lessons without videos are available for: